


Cathleen’s Winged Guest

by fish_in_fridge



Category: Fantasy - Fandom
Genre: Gen, and a little human girl, first attempt on entirely original work, personal original work, set in a time before wide use of Internet and portable digital devices, with angel-like supernatural beings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-17
Updated: 2016-07-17
Packaged: 2018-07-24 13:48:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7510732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fish_in_fridge/pseuds/fish_in_fridge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Cathleen Timmes learned her businessman father would be unable to attend her seventh birthday party, she didn't expect to receive an extraordinary guest in his place. The said guest, who puzzled and roused suspicions among Cathleen's tiny community, proved a much more difficult character for her to pin down: a most stubborn and least compassionate "angel" she declared she'd ever lived to and fancied to live to see, Cathleen simply found herself unable to dislike this stranger, and hard to say goodbye to him when a parting was inevitable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cathleen’s Winged Guest

From time to time, Key summons a being from the worlds of the living. The summoned thence leave their home places, and arrive at Key’s terminal that is no habitat for any creatures - a spot of perpetual standing that sets itself between the myriad of worlds that were, are and are to be; but the terminal remains no domain of any such worlds. There the summoned shed their personal pasts aside, and gradually become one with Key. They are known as Keyed.

It is relied upon Key to unlock all portals between separate worlds, and to enable ordained migrants to cross such realms as no others except for the Keyed would lay foot on. Key is evoked when the right time comes, when such pilgrimages are deemed necessary and essential for once and for all. Key has an all-encompassing vision of Its own, where all events that have befallen and are to befall are soundly kept and meticulously archived down to their tiniest details, and it is Key’s vision which channels Its sense of timing, and Its self-perceived exertion.

Key never self-activates, nevertheless, and relies upon beings that breathe life to bring forth Its cosmic power, to aid It perform Its duty to all worlds. The Keyed are like an agent.

By becoming Keyed, the summoned gain what knowledge, and wisdom, and sight as are intrinsic to Key, and wield what they have in this way acquired to exercise Key’s operations. The Keyed know exactly when to open what portals, and when to stand by, because Key knows, and passes Its knowledge to them. Key decides, and the Keyed live by Its decisions. The Keyed do __not__  wield Key; they serve Key.

Attempts are nevertheless made to contest the will of Key from time to time. Their consequences are disastrous: worlds have been destroyed in such attempts. Some rebellions are deliberately conceived and launched, others are but grievous by-products of doubt, fear, indecision, subconscious contempt, mislaid attachment, and other elements of the fallible nature of the mortal Keyed. Key thus decrees that all summoned shall go through an apprenticeship, where Its servants shall learn to forgo their traits of weakness that are typical of beings come from within worlds, and strengthen their bond with Key. The tutelage of the newly summoned is given to elder Keyed, who will soon be relieved from their duty to Key and to the worlds.

The order of the Keyed are, in their essence, a living vessel of Key, even though the lives of each member are altered through being Keyed in more ways than the unKeyed can ever imagine. Like all vessels, the Keyed wear down with repeated use and prolonged exertion. The Keyed are mortal creatures in nature, no matter how their origins, their forms and their lifespans differ; they are not designated to bear the burden of Key for eternity. Therefore new Keyed are summoned, apprenticed, fully employed, and eventually replaced by next generation of novices.

Throughout their tenure as servants for Key, the Keyed faithfully carry out the will of Key, and walk from world to world as their missions prompt them. They do not stop at any worlds, and never cross the portals that lead into worlds - for that is forbidden. But it is their obligation, actually their routine, to escort mass folk for countless and mostly eventless one-way journeys: to guide their charges along their destined pathways that are invisible to all but the Keyed; to drop them at the respective portals where they are expected; to keep them from wandering, loitering or attempting to make back towards their place of departure.

Because at times, world-crossing travelers can stir up really hazardous incidents in their hybrid of ignorance and willfulness.

And this is what the most lately summoned apprentice now has to face.

* * *

The apprentice has lost contact with his tutor. The effort to guide and persuade this distressed, wayward spirit has eventually come to be a one-on-one combat of will.

This man __is__  grief-stricken, the apprentice judges; but that does not justify _ _his__  act. Mourning or no, he should be following the Keyed’s lead, and arrive where he is awaited - that would, in the end, shorten his suffering. The apprentice doesn’t feel lapses of time, but he understands the concept, and can actually sympathize with it.

The storming emotions of the man is suffering from are, on the other hand, what the apprentice do not sympathize with. He can make them out - there he is trained, though less than adequately. But Key has indeed showed him an inventory of senses and sensibilities that are known to inhabitants of various worlds, and from this particular person the apprentice recognizes a sense of loss - something resulted from the life-and-death separation from the someone he has formed the strongest attachment to, though what this attachment signifies is lost to the apprentice, who has experienced nothing of its like, either as the Keyed he now is or in a previous life that he barely remembers.

Even so, the man is being unreasonable: he is not going to his beloved for very long, not really: they will be reunited in their world of destination. The apprentice and his tutor have explained the very fact to this bereaved man time and again, but to no avail. He leashes out all the same, disregarding those who are assigned to his aid, and chooses to launch himself into the gulping darkness which is, for the duration of his journey, the only reality for him to behold.

The apprentice, like all Keyed, enjoys the privileged sight of all the crisscrossing traffic scattered about the space, or non-space, between worlds. But the charge sees none of them; without the knowledge that his soul-mate is treading the very same pathway with him, and was nudging practically right beside him just a moment ago, he fancies himself a loner abandoned into a world of perpetualized alienness. Worse, he feels deceived: the realm for the deceased doesn’t recall any bit of what he was told in his lifetime; his guides’ explanation, that the dead have a pathway - what resembles the tunnels from his life experience - to cross makes no sense to him either. He’d rather believe himself misled, and is resolved to look for his destination on his own.

One of those guides is somehow always a step or two behind him, and is unable to lose; which irks him excruciatingly. Now frustrated and desperate, he lashes a forceful strike at his perceived captor. And it lands squarely into his target.

And this is definitely no physical attack. Usual punches, kicks, pinches and scratches do not affect a Keyed to the slightest degree, but this strike leaves the apprentice with the sensation that his inside is being burned, chilled, clawed, squeezed and rolled upside-down all at once. He is caught off his balance, and has to brace himself for the fall, even though he is in a non-space where it is virtually impossible to fall, or lose balance, or feel any real pains. He has known, since what is like a forever ago, that his wings doesn’t have to work the way wings usually work, and has been living with this fact all through his Keyed life, yet at this very moment he has to spread his wings, and flap them, and half-fold them, and angle them a little upward, and steady them, and stretch them to their widest span once again, and repeat all those moves continually: it feels right, keeping moving - even if his present “upward” is not really a pair of functioning wings should point at.

The apprentice tries to shake off this feeling. Once he comes to think, it feels wrong. Wronger than it has once been right. Allowing himself a free fall that isn’t really a fall, the newly Keyed takes what momentum he can gather and rushes back to his attacker, his charge. It is his duty to send this traveler back to his pathway and set him move onward.

He should have been really prepared at first, muses the apprentice. Despite his mistrust of the two particular Keyed, that man has experienced ample, if somewhat distorted, teaching about the Keyed people during his life, as all his kindred does. The existence of Key and the Keyed is no common knowledge in most of the worlds, and in the worlds where they __are__  known, reputation of the Keyed tends to polarize drastically. In some their figures are looked upon with awe and worship, in others their names are whispered in hushed tales and ungainly rumors. People from worlds of either belief are somehow equally difficult.

But the apprentice will not allow this difficulty to limit his career. His devotion to his duty is strong, and he is actually proud of what he is doing. Though it is not a shared or encouraged sentiment to take pride in one’s Keyed status. Locating his man, which is fairly easy as __he__  is the only one here wandering off course, and approaching him, which can also be easily done even with his wings folded and nestled against his spine, the apprentice once again salutes the spirit assigned to his guidance...

And is met with a even more forceful strike which sends him worlds away from where he ought to stay.

Impossibly dizzy, the apprentice finds his brain is working on its own accord while half of his body is wrapped tightly into a clinging heat which boils, and evaporates, and permeates in and out of his veins, and heats up even more. The only sensible fraction of his brain is hardly working, and the conjectures about his present state, the regrets about his failed task and the worries for other folk who are left unguided and unguarded because of his absence simply do not help with the brain’s restoration. As for the rest of his brain, that is the funny part. Millions of images that he cannot quite register are flowing above his consciousness, images after images after images. Most of them are hazy, blurry, faded in color and quality, but each of them gives him a jerk at his nerves that shadows the feels of heat and pain. The apprentice always has this impression that he has lived his entire life as he __is__ , even though he is very aware that he is summoned to become his present self at the same time. The fact that even he has a past is just an inconsequential knowledge that stays at the back of his head, one he is never motivated to probe into. And now, as the millions of images pass in and out of him and as his mind’s eye scroll through their sequence, their content, their outstanding details, he feels that he has lived every piece of them, and some more...

_What is this? What is happening to me?_

Key makes no answer. Only more images, which obviously come not from Key, flood at him and immerse him thoroughly, growing brighter and clearer till they glow; and with them sounds, scents, and strange feels of warmth and coolness tugging at him.

Till he feels a thud, and a solidness embraces him. Beneath him lies something which is soft, and warm, and slightly humid, and pleasantly tickling, and beside and above him something which doesn’t feel like anything is flowing and rolling and caressing him gently.

Almost like the feel of the dark-haired woman he last laid his eyes on before the thud comes.

He tries to recall her enigmatic, yet soothing image, to focus his consciousness on her for a bit longer. It somehow proves too much exertion. The winged apprentice contently succumbs to his drowsiness, and his lids flip no more.


End file.
